I just watched a cool documentary about Turkey and a lot of it dealt with conservative Muslims vs. non-conservative Muslims vs. a secular nation.
Two points about women’s headcoverings sort of confused me:
The mayor of a large city has a wife who wears a head covering. They said she is not allowed to wear her head covering to official state events (but can wear it in other public places).
Three young women were applying for a job, two wore head coverings. The employer asked one something along the lines of “don’t you think your head covering will hold you back?” and she had to politely defend her choice to wear one on the job. But yet she didn’t seem offended - as if she was asked about it all the time.
The two things above seem very strange to me since Turkey’s population is largely Muslim. While the country has government-funded moqsues and apparently a lot of new businesses allow for Friday bus trips to pray, Turkey prides itself on being a “secular democracy” - but it’s not like Islam is hush-hush over there. So why all the hubub about women wearing head coverings?
Is it like this (a secular democracy) in any other predominantly Muslim country?
Strict observance of Sharia law requires that a woman be totally covered.
Less observant women relax the requirement to a head scarf as token observance or no scarf at all.
“A woman is to be heard and not seen?”
Turkey is unusual among predominantly Muslim countries, because Kemal Attaturk actually banned the headscarf by law in all federal functions, to foster secularism (IIRC). Having said that, there is a wide spread across Muslim communities about the headscarf; many Muslim women don’t bother; in other places, it’s mandatory - and all the phases in between.
I’ve had all-too-brief conversations with a Turkish friend about the importance of secularity(?) in the country, and she is adamant that this, and particularly the fact that the military is on this side, is what has prevented the country from sinking into civil war. On the other hand, I’ve never pushed her on the small matter of the treatment of Kurds. To the OP - from what little I know, Turkey is unique, in many ways!
Is this headcovering banning the only “publically conservative Muslim” practice that has been banned/frowned upon? In the documentary I didn’t see anything other than women’s head coverings that made anyone appear more conservative than anyone else.
I actually didn’t see any males with their heads covered except a gentleman who wore a cap while leading a prayer during a conservative Muslim company’s business meeting (the company specializes in conservative Muslim women’s clothing).
Just guesses based on vague knowledge of Turkey and on the usually similar conception of secularity in Turkey and France
I suspect this would probably be considered an endorsement of religion and/or that scarves are simply banned during all official events. For instance, I knowthe scarf is banned in universities.
The scarf is a big issue in Turkey. Mustafa Kemal made the country a secular one, and this have been upheld by his political heirs (he’s a big big historical figure in Turkey. Maybe the equivalent of Washington + the founding fathers in the USA) and by the army, who, for a long time, considered itself the warden of the Turkish republic, and did not hesitate to take over when it thought that politicians were deviating from “the line”. So, secularism has been forced upon people. Many didn’t mind and still don’t, or even strongly support this stance (once again, Kemalism borders on faith, as far as I can tell). However, the religious conservatives want to be rid of the most supra-secularist laws, and very specifically of the ban of the scarf. This became a hot issue during the recent years for two main reasons as far as I can tell :
A religious rebirth, like in many other muslim countries, and even more so, the fact that religion gained ground amongst the educated and urban classes (as opposed to your semi-litterate villager nobody cared about)
The political system became much more liberal during the last couple decades or so, allowing debate and large expressions of dissent.
The well-known opposition of ** Opal Cat ** to the ban of headscarves
So, I’m not surprised that these young women aren’t surprised by the comments. They know that wearing a scarf in some situations will be perceived by some people (both employers and customers) as the public expression of an opinion which is not only religious but borders on the political, and might be frowned upon,so costing them a job.
The complete, burka-style, head to toe covering for women is actually restricted to some limited areas of the muslim world and it has more to do with local tradition than with religious law. In most muslim countries, women wearing only a headscarf wouldn’t be perceived as less observant, because it would be the expected norm, and burkas would appear as unusual as they would in the streets of Paris.